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The Houseless Shadow – a film by William Raban

Inspired by one of Dickens’s finest essays, ‘Night Walks’, first published in 1860, this filmportrays London at night and explores the rhythms, sounds and shadows of today’s city.

‘Not being a creature of the night myself, I was challenged by the task of retracing thegreat man’s footsteps, setting off after midnight and returning “in the small hours” toobserve and capture London districts and their insomniac communities. The first taskwas to become invisible so that I could film without people becoming affronted by thecamera. I carried the equipment in a large supermarket bag, pulling the tripod behind mestrapped to a luggage trolley. I blended with the other houseless people of the nightand soon they became my friends. Filmed over five months, when luck was on my side,I returned with good shots; at other times, I came back with nothing – such arethe fortunes of street cinematography.’

William Raban, October 2011

Dickens’s Victorian London  bookOver 200 archive photographs – most of which have neverbeen published before – illustrate this mesmerising guide toVictorian London as seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens.

The book is available from the Museum shop or atwww.museumoflondonshop.co.uk£25 RRP, available for the special price of £20during the exhibition run.

Dickens: Dark London appThe Museum of London has launched a new iPhone and iPad app which takesusers on a journey through the darker side of Dickens’s London. Beautifully imaginedby illustrator David Foldvari, this graphic novel follows Dickens on his night walks of 

London. Actor Mark Strong gives voice to Dickens as passages from his works provide vividdescriptions of the Victorian capital. Bonus material featuring illustrated excerpts of some of Dickens’s most famous novels also bring the 19th century city to life.

Drawn from a selection of his short stories, Dickens: Dark London will be published monthlythroughout the exhibition. The first edition is available now free of charge from iTunes.Each subsequent edition will be available to download for £1.49.

Dickens and London printsPrints of a selection of photographs, featured inthe exhibition and the accompanying publicationDickens’s Victorian London, can be purchasedfrom our print-on-demand touch screen in theshop foyer and fromwww.museumoflondonprints.com

Dickens’s Legacy

Today, 200 years after his birth, Charles Dickens is acknowledged asthe first, and arguably greatest, modern urban novelist. His writingsform a giant atlas of the life of the metropolis. Dickens and Londonare indelibly bound together.

Dickens tracks a changing society in an industrial age. Many aspects of hiswork are profoundly unsettling, especially his insistent descriptions of theterrible living conditions of the poor, whose sufferings were largely ignored.

Dickens’s ultimate aim was to reform and improve society. He attackedfinancial fraud, Government incompetence, ‘red tape’ (a term that heinvented) and inadequate education. Sadly, inequalities and poverty stillexist in London, still blighting lives. Dickens’s words still challenge us today:

‘I saw that not one miserable wretch breathed out his poisoned lifein the deepest cellar of the most neglected town, but, from the surroundingatmosphere, some particles of his infection were borne away, chargedwith heavy retribution on the general guilt.’

From ‘A December Vision’, HouseholdWords , 1850

‘Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always,as she thought, in one direction—always towardsthe town. Swallowed up in one phase or other of itsimmensity, towards which they seemed impelled bya desperate fascination, they never returned.Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons,the river, fever, madness, vice, and death,—theypassed on to the monster, roaring in the distance,and were lost.’

Dombey andSon, Chapter 33

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Dickens and London

Charles Dickens takes us right into the beating heart of themetropolis. London was the world’s first modern city.He reveals it in all its complexity, movement and energy.We hear its hum and lively chatter. We are shownits squalor and drabness, its extremes of wealth

and poverty.

Dickens burst onto the literary scene in themid 1830s. His work stood out from the rest.It seemed to capture the mood of the period.His writings had a distinctive feel and pace

with a lively use of language and vivi dcharacterisation. Within a few years, Dickens wasa celebrity and the latest instalments of his novelswere eagerly awaited at home and abroad.

What drove Dickens’s imagination and creativity?This exhibition celebrates London as his muse.He called the city his ‘magic lantern’. He described thenew urban consciousness and the experiences of ordinarypeople. Walter Bagehot described Charles Dickens as London’s

‘special correspondent for posterity’.

A City of Imagination

Dickens was an insomniac and needed little sleep. He thought nothing of walking the streets of London all night long. Through such regular excursions,he developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s geography. Dickens hadan extraordinary visual memory. He described his mind as a ‘sort of capitallyprepared and highly sensitive [photographic] plate’.

The variety and complexity of the city fed his creativity. As he walked, hemapped out the intricate storylines of his novels. Just as his fictional characters

made their way from one place to another, so he followed in theirfootsteps across the real city.

Dickens also listened closely to

sounds, especially overheardconversations. He was a master atdistinguishing dialect, intonation andword pattern, a skill that made thevoices of his characters ring true.

Amusements of the People

Above all, Dickens set out to amuse his readers. This he certainly did: his dynamicand exuberant way with words made him the most popular writer since Shakespeare.

Dickens saw the London theatre as an escape from the

toil and drabness of everyday urban life. It was a ‘fairy land’,a place full of enchantment, excitement and colour. As a boy,his imagination had been fired up by a visit to a Christmaspantomime at Sadler’s Wells. And as a young man he nearlybecame an actor, but was laid up in bed with a bad cold on

the day of his audition. All his life he remained an actorat heart.

Dickens was also a skilled stage-manager, arrangingprivate theatrical performances for friends, and even forQueen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1857.

Highlights: Astley’s amphitheatre panel,Grimaldi clown outfit, toy theatre model.

Highlights: Furnival’s Inn watchman’s box,Newgate prison door, Bleak House  

manuscript, accents and dialects audiointeractive, stereoscopic viewers.

‘…the great heart of London throbs in itsGiant breast. Wealth and beggary, vice and virtue,guilt and innocence, repletion and the direst hunger,all treading on each other and crowding together,are gathered round it. Draw but a little circle abovethe clustering house-tops, and you shall have withinits space, everything with its opposite extreme andcontradiction, close beside.’

Master Humphrey’sClock , 1841